SiCKO Response/ My Family's Health Plan Research

The health care that my family has is under a family plan through my mother’ union 1199 SEIU, which covers me, my brother, my mom and my dad. As far as I have heard from my parents, they have paid out a good deal of our medical bills. This includes hospital visits, ER visits, doctors appointments, and everthing else. Personally I have not spent that much time in an emergency room, but between me, and my family, we have gone a good number of times to the ER. The only real problem with a high medical bill that my parents told me about was not for any of the people in my family, but my dog (Harpo) who had to be taken to the hospital right before he died. The veteranarian, and animal hospital bill was not at all covered by insurance, so the total cost for not being able to save my dog was around $7,000 which we will be paying off for quite some time.

Recently my dad has been sick and undergone treatment for prostate cancer. The recovery and procedure went well and he has been recovering very well. I remember that around the time he first told me that he had cancer, he was also trying to decide what treatment option he would be choosing. The interesting thing was hearing how he ruled out certain treatment options because they were not covered by the insurance. Once we watched SiCKO, I realized that had the only viable option for treatment not been covered by the insurance, we might not have been able to afford treatment, which for me is some scary shit.

As far as I know nobody in my family has been denied treatment, but I do know that my great aunt who was like a second mother to my dad, was treated very poorly in the hospital before she died. My dad found out and sued the hospital for negligence (I think it was negligence) and he won, but his aunt was still dead.

I think that in contrast, my experience, and my families experance with health care has been much better than the average experience of people in America, and far better than the experience of anyone in Michael Moore’s movie. This proves not that his movie is an unfair depiction of the American health care system (the opposite is true; the movie very accurately depicts our health system), but that my family and I have been pretty fortunate in our lives as far as medical bills and expenses are concerned.